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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rupert1 who wrote (54962)	3/27/1999 9:57:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 97611

victor - or the most important question - (e) Are the customers who are already most at risk because they have ignored the Y2K problem thus far the best ones to ask about how serious the problem will be for them this year? The assumption on SMB Y2K has been that these customers will finally wake up and do some testing sometime in 1999 and that they will at that point have no choice but to upgrade hardware because the clock will have run out on other options, and because an upgrade solution for a company with limited IT infrastructure may also be the least expensive solution. For example, according to a Novell executive I spoke with last week, of the more than 2 million Novell users running non-Y2K compliant NetWare 2xx and 3xx systems, less than 10% had upgraded to compliant versions by the end of 1998. Many of this same class of customer run NT 3.51 or back-rev NT4x versions. Because they often have little or no in-house IT staff, these people often do not understand that they will have to upgrade hardware to run newer versions of software which is Y2K compliant. Again pointing to the Novell base, more than 50% of the installed base of older systems are on hardware which will not support the compliant versions of the software. This is also a great services play if CPQ can get a relatively low cost "Y2K upgrade" service as the best way for these customers to clean up their act. I understand that there will be major programs on this topic throughout the year at CPQ.